A Christian Pilgrimage: The Internet.

Recently a situation arose where there became a need for me do some research work through the internet.

The returns from a search query - about 825,000,000 results.

My connection with the internet started when it was still in its infancy (the time when the public and commercial usage was just beginning to catch on) when most private connections to the internet was using dial-up connections. I was among the more fortunate of the some five and a half billion population at that time. In those days email (Uucp mail) was spelt with a hyphen, and was the primary public usage followed by Telnet. Usenet news group were the main avenue for anyone who need to research on a certain topic while files download were primary via Ftp. They were all very limited and information was hard to locate compared to the easy web searches we have today. Even with the later advent of the popular internet http search engines, the most popular of these search engines, Yahoo, was grossly inaccurate returning tons of leads the bulk of which were totally irrelevant unless you were very skill at crafting the specific words relevant to what you were seeking. Even then the information that was published was very limited.

In Praise of the Internet.

If I have to vote for the most enabling technology of humankind, the internet would get my vote. No other advancement of humankind has got more people communicating and collaborating on the scale made possible by the internet. Today there is no greater empowerment of the individual as well as human society as a whole than the internet.

During my school days the only means I had of doing research was my school library and the local small town library. The available resources on any topic were severely limited and the topic available too were severely limit.

Today with the internet right in the comfort of my residence I could browse and search on topics and issues I never even imagine existed. All this at a few keystrokes and behold tens of millions of leads and articles are near instantly available for my perusal. The internet of today is several industries on a computer. These ranges from social and communication, postage and delivery, news, educational, health (not pharmaceutical), entertainment, tourism, research, espionage both commercial and political, security, sales and marketing (wholesale and retail, products and services), trading, finance and banking, real estate, employment and career, etc. All these industries’ transactions can be conducted through a computer while sitting in your home.

Anyone with a computer connected with internet service from a local ISP can near instantly avail of all kinds of information that it can truly be said that no one who can read need to be ignorant anymore.

Let the users beware!

But the internet is also full of booby traps with dangerous snares and baits where predators and parasites prey on an unsuspecting public. As the ultimate avenue for free speech letting anyone who so desired to publish to an immediately reachable worldwide audience, it has become a sort of bastion of freedom which comes with a very high price tag. It is the ultimate reflection of human society filled with much good but an extremely disproportionately larger amount of evil. Here we find the rudiments of the human psyche thoroughly expressed in the necessities, the passions and the motivations. Every possible views and opinions on every possible subjects have their share of proponents and opponents such that any one will be able to find ‘justification’ for whatever they want to believe in advocated and advanced in this bastion of near total freedom of speech.

Loaded with all kinds of information it is also loaded with all kinds of misinformation of half-truths, twisted truths and outright lies. Plagiarizing of ideas, and both artistic and literally written works (intellectual properties) are brazen and rampant. So are ridiculous propositions, postulations, views and opinions, arrogantly and vehemently expressed and touted.

Anyone wishing to use the internet to research on a topic or issue needs to step very carefully, double and triple checking all the facts with as many sources both positive and negative are available. Even after doing all this there still is the need for a very organized, analytical and logical mind to identify the basis of each premise and how this contribute to the final conclusion whether this is conclusive or otherwise. An ability to understand and recognize the various conceptual basis to drawing a conclusion is essential. Likewise too the extremely rare ability to recognized obvious contradictions in arguments, logic and hypothesis.

With the onset of internet search engines the http content published on the internet began to grow exponentially. This was also when dishonesty and bad faith started to raise its ugly head in the publication of online content. To ensure that their pages were picked up by the search engines and returned in the first few search result entries, many publishers began to add multiples of the same words and other irrelevant popular search words into their meta tags and other hidden text in their pages. What this did was it caused totally irrelevant results to be returned when a person searched for a topic or subject. Because of this practice most search engines stop using the meta tag in their page ranking considerations until quite recently.

Today different forms of cheating are being practiced even as the search engines algorithms have improved considerably to root out cheating which returns false positives and are detrimental to their search results integrity. Sites that had been determined by the search engines to be cheating would be removed from the search engines' 'crawlers' and would not be returned in any of the search query results. An entire industrial now caters to teaching web publishers how they may make use of the search engines algorithms to improve their site performances in internet search results. This is called search engine optimization or SEO. So the cheating continues.

So the cheaters shifted to other ways by exploiting the SEO algorithm. These they now do through 'dummy' back links (there is a whole business channel just doing sales of back links), non-content relevant formulated key word densities and various other means. According to statistic of search engines query results, most searchers will only click on the first three return items of each search. Every publishers of content would try to provision themselves so that their pages are listed among the top three query results of each search content category. If a person is not thorough in his search query for an item or subject he will end up with poorly researched and written or even grossly inaccurate information.

If you are familiar with the music industry how they tried to prevent people from making copies of their media items illegally by putting in special codes into these media, you would know that these have not proven to be effective. Aside from cracking these codes, copyright pirates have found ways to circumvent these repeatedly. So also it is with internet search engines. The problem is not with the algorithm or the encryption but with the basic dishonesty “inherent” in the human psyche, expressed through bad faith.

And that is where the whole problem with the current world of man lies. Bad faith is so pervasive in the societies of man. Near to everyone practices bad faith to some degree and yet we can't see this great evil for what it is and what it has been doing to the societies of man since the foundation of this age of man. This great evil permeates every level of our societies.

It is the source of all the deceptiveness in the human psyche which the Holy Scripture recorded as incurable, meaning it is impossible for man to cure himself of this deceptiveness of the human heart (mind). But that does not mean that GOD cannot cure it.

We like to think we are not doing any evil, that we are good people, or at least mostly good and definitely not evil. Well not from GOD's perspective, which is the precise reason LORD JESUS CHRIST is coming soon to destroy all the wicked of this age to start a New World Order on a fresh clean slate. But this time around GOD is also going to remove the ruler of this world, the Prince of the power of the air, so that he would no longer be manipulating and tempting humankind to do all manner of evil, in the New World Order.

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Special Note

Please note that all discussion by this author are based on a general non expert assessment of information gathered from material published in the public domain (i,e, readily available to members of the public). All of this author's discussions are presented as material for any and all lay person with no special expertise. Anyone twelve years of age and older, who is not mentally incapacitated in some ways, would (or should anyway) be able to understand any and all the discussions of this author. You do not need to be an expert or a genius to understand the simple and straight forward truths discussed by this author.

All “proclaimed and acclaimed” super mega brilliant supremely intelligent geniuses leading experts, defining master authorities, super holier than GOD man, women, entities and beings of whatever godly glorious illustrative mega holy and reverent titles, please go somewhere else to announce and proclaim your supreme superiority and lowest humility over all other members of humankind.

A Christian Pilgrimage

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Sunday, January 9, 2011

The Internet.